


Crown Me

by Calyps0



Category: The Blacklist (US TV)
Genre: F/M, Lizzington - Freeform, One-Shot, Red/Lizzie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-12
Updated: 2019-02-12
Packaged: 2019-10-27 01:13:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17756984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Calyps0/pseuds/Calyps0
Summary: A short little musing on names.





	Crown Me

There had been a mission—a silly thing, really. It should have never escalated to the point that it had. He might be getting slower in his age, less attuned to possible betrayals. He’d scheduled a meeting with some associates to discuss payment for an artifact he’d acquired, and, unbeknownst to him, she had followed him along. How she had known they’d turn on him, launch an attack, turn the musty warehouse into a sudden and fierce warzone, he couldn’t say. His heart was a broken, sodden thing, steeped deeply in pain and numbness, but he swore that when he saw her there—saw her take down an assailant, his would be assassin, with clinical, calculated movements, as if saving him was not something she’d even take the time to think about— his heart skipped a beat, electric and alive. The idea that she cared was almost too much for him to bear. So much pain had passed between them—so much judgment, so much hatred—like blood pouring through veins, fiery and thick, but there was a fierceness to her loyalty, to her compassion, to her capacity to love.

_Soft, then hard, then soft again._

They’re back at his safe house, now, in the cool haze of dawn, wounded and weary. She’s tending to superficial cuts they’ve both sustained, giving him lingering glances that alternate between concern and irritation, as if she’s annoyed that he’s put himself into danger, _again_.

What a strange thought.

He shifts a bit and winces at the movement. A bouquet of bruises blossoms across his shoulders, his back, his chest. Pain and blood dance in symphony about his body, tall but withering.

She sits up and looks at his face, her eyes lingering lightly on a thick cut above his eyebrow and the deep rivulet of blood that trails from it, travels like a swirling river down his jawline.

“Raymond,” she says once, a sigh. “ _Raymond.”_

The word seeps out into the night, resisting his attempts to bottle it up, keep it for himself, in a jar, close to his chest.

_Raymond._

It’s so beautiful, so heartbreakingly beautiful, the way she says it, and it’s not even his real name.

How horrible is that?

How awful must he be to withhold that from her? First the identity of her parents, her entire past, erased, dissolved into bits, and now there are even parts of her present that are half-truths.

 _No,_ he wants to say.

Not Raymond.

A name he has, but has been lost, forgotten, to time and family long passed.

 _“Lizzie,”_ he breathes, heartbreak seeping from his pores.

Or… _Masha?_

What a pair, they two, born of one name and transformed into another. Forged by pain and grief, and pasts irrevocably intertwined.

Him—navy general, war hero, turned killer, murdered by fire.

And her— Russian princess, now American hero, reborn from the ashes.

And now they stand, soft and together in the quiet of the small tiled bathroom, so very human in the midst of bandages and wet rags— Raymond and Lizzie.

Two people, names they’ve acquired over the years, neither of them true.

But, as he stares at her—her strength, the proud tilt of her jaw, the path she has chosen, made, all by herself—he realizes that the names they were born with, crowned with, chained into, were never who they truly were. They were never what defined them.

But these new ones?

They suit them just fine.

 


End file.
